Florian Cramer on Mon, 28 Sep 2015 02:55:38 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> VW |
It'll be very interesting indeed to hear what the stars of ~German media theory have to say about this. Maybe about as much as most US academics have to say about their role in imposing indentured servitude on subsequent generations... The German state of Lower Saxony owns more than 20% of Volkswagen stock, a legacy from the Third Reich when the company was founded on Hitler's order and owned by the NSDAP's labor organization. The Volkswagen Endowment, whose sole purpose is the funding of academic research, was created with the money that Lower Saxony and the federal government of Germany made when 80% of the company went public after WWII. As far as I know, all profits that the state of Lower Saxony makes from its remaining 20% share go into the endowment. And, Leuphana is a state university of Lower Saxony. - Whatever one may object to these close ties between state and industry (described as "state monopoly capitalism" by some Marxists), it also has some social advantages when companies are partially owned by the public and their profits go into financing public research and tuition-less public education. There are other aspects in German media theory, cultural studies and humanities academia that I find by far more objectionable. For example, how the more or less biggest names of German media theory and cultural studies - Friedrich Kittler, Peter Sloterdijk, Horst Bredekamp, Hans Belting - got in bed with Germany's yellow press tycoon Hubert Burda (owner of Hubert Burda Media, publisher of among others "Bunte", "Focus", "Super-Illu", the German "Playboy" and minority shareholder of German tv station RTL2) for Burda's conferences and publications on the "iconic turn", as documented on the website http://www.iconicturn.de. (The website itself is run by the Hubert Burda Foundation.) For those who can read German: http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/kultur/article10863152/Bilder-rasc heln-nicht.html . Quick translation of the second paragraph: "Bazon Brock isn't Hubert Burda's only dialogue partner and intellectual friend. Peter Sloterdijk, Friedrich Kittler, Horst Bredekamp, Wolfgang Ullrich, Hans Belting are also part of the circle; top-notch art historians and cultural analysts, and reliable contributors to academic criticism. In Karlsruhe, where Burda's book was presented, they all sat in a half circle, an honorable club of men. It was quite touching how politely they all demonstrated their respect for the author. Wolfgang Ullrich, wonderfully insubordinate younger generation art historian, called his colleague, the Ph.D. art historian Hubert Burda, an 'embedded scientist' who had managed to infiltrate the business world for espionage work. Horst Bredekamp, wonderfully down-to-the-earth mid-career art historian, showed a reproduction of a 'Hörzu' (German 'TV Guide') double page to praise its structured view on the world of television." - Regarding jaromil's objection that firmware (especially of critical technical devices) should be Open Source: yes, but this won't be enough. Volkswagen could have released its firmware in 2005 as Free Software/Open Source with the manipulation code cleverly obfuscated, speculating on the fact that the release would have remained relatively low profile (as opposed to popular Open Source software like, for example, Apache or the Linux kernel, which passes hundreds of critical eyes every day). For sure, the odds of discovery would still have been better then. But what's really needed are mandatory independent code audits for firmware - similar to the approval procedures for medical drugs. If such policies were in place, they also would have huge implications for the so-called "Internet of Things". -F
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